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Our blog is the perfect place to get an insider’s perspective into the Isaacson School for New Media experience. See what we’ve been up to, read student stories, and learn a little more about the adventure.

The Colorado Press Association, in partnership with the Colorado Broadcasters Association and the Colorado Media Alliance, is sponsoring the first-ever Colorado Journalism Week beginning April 16. Lisa Schlichtman, president of CPA's board of directors and editor of the Steamboat Pilot & Today, asked Colorado Mountain College to comment on the ...read more

It's not every day that a photography student gets a chance to participate in a public art exhibit. For aspiring professional photographers, having work accepted into a gallery show provides a special opportunity.

“A lot of people see what we post to social media,” said Jordan King, a Colorado ...read more

Andrew Travers
The Aspen Times
Max Grange is a skier, musician, artist and animal lover. Which is to say, the 30-year-old Snowmass native is a lot like his mountain town peers.
But as the new short documentary "Big Air Max" makes clear, the rest of us have a lot to learn from Grange.
A childhood accident left him with spastic quadriplegia. He is confined to a wheelchair and speaks through a computer system. Yet those limitations don't hold Grange back from much, nor do they dampen his bright smile and buoyant, brave spirit. The 10-minute "Big Air Max," which has its world premiere Sunday at the 5Point Film Festival in Carbondale, offers an inspirational profile of Grange, his family and his friends.
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Radio CMC just got a brand new studio at the Colorado Mountain College Spring Valley campus, in addition to the first one in Glenwood Springs. The radio station has been broadcasting to the Roaring Fork Valley and online since 2011, thanks to students, instructors, sponsors and local partnerships.
The radio station is a powerful tool for Isaacson School for New Media students to create, record and broadcast audio content such as radio shows, interviews, podcasts and music. The two studios are equipped with recording and editing softwares, professional mixing boards, microphones, pre amps and a remote broadcasting kit, so students can master all aspects of radio production.
Currently, Radio CMC has around twenty students actively creating content as interns, volunteers or paid staff, along with many members of the Roaring Fork Valley community and Colorado Mountain College instructors, who also contribute with operations and creative help. They are all involved in the production of a variety of shows about music, news, films, entertainment, life style, business, entrepreneurship and other topics.
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Winter X Games Aspen 2017 is in Colorado Mountain College's backyard, so students are ideally located to get involved in what ESPN calls one of the world's biggest extreme sports events. Held Jan. 26-29 at Aspen's Buttermilk Mountain, the games are expected to draw more than 100,000 people to attend ...read more

Aaron Brassard is a graduate of the Isaacson School for New Media who came to school looking for opportunity. While here he explored video production, graphics, and all types of new media. He was invited to work at the Winter X-Games in Aspen as a student and from there has built a career in digital sports production. Most recently Aaron worked at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, and he has some great advice for people entering the field of new media:

"Working the Olympics is a dream come true, honestly I never thought of it being a possibility. It has been a surreal experience to say the least, as Rio is not the most luxurious place, it is still simply amazing as long as you keep your eyes peeled. Working in the same room as directors, producers, switchers, playback operators, camera operators, production assistants, all I see is more opportunities ahead. (more…)

From left, Tyler Moebius, Jerry Murdock, Walter Isaacson, Lynda Resnick and Marc Nathanson discuss the future of Colorado Mountain College's Isaacson School for New Media during a meeting of the college's board of overseers in Aspen on Aug. 8. Photo Charles Engelbert

Rachel Williams photo illustration “Disagio” won a gold medal in the 71st annual College Photographer of the Year (CPOY) category. Williams also won a silver and an honorable mention with two additional images in the Illustration category at ...read more

Joseph Gamble and I had the pleasure of taking our second year professional photography students to see an exhibit of Ansel Adams photographs at the Quintenz Gallery in Aspen, Colorado as part of a gallery and museum tour we did during the first week of classes. (more…)

A free public reception at the CMC ArtShare Gallery will be held Sept. 11, 2015, featuring the travel and street photography of CMC photography faculty Joseph Gamble. Among pieces on display will be “Dalla Dance Al Jazz, Milan, Italy, 2005.”

Joseph Gamble is a professional photographer and a professor of photography ...read more

Colorado Mountain College and the Isaacson School for New Media co-hosted the Aspen Institute’s Society of Fellows Discussion Reception Monday night, which featured Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper in conversation with Jane Harman, president and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and (more…)

Last weekend, three Spring Valley faculty and staff– Johann Aberger, Seth Andersen, and Derek Johnston – summited Colorado's Pyramid Peak with CMC President Carrie Hauser and her husband Jeff on a beautiful bluebird day. Seth Andersen, photographer and photo and lab tech for the Isaacson School for New Media, ...read more

By Desiree Raven
It happens every day. A young girl of 17 finds herself pregnant. For Isaacson School student Veronica Mendivil this was her reality and she didn’t want to become a teen mom cliché.
“I thought I would have to work at McDonald’s the rest of my life,” Mendivil said. “I really didn’t know what I was going to do.”
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[video width="1920" height="1080" mp4="http://isaacsonschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/drone-testing.mp4"][/video]
Once in a while the Isaacson School faculty and staff find great ways to test our equipment. Today we went out to document visiting elementary school students with the drone. Always good to get outside on a nice day with great views at our Spring Valley Campus.

Where will Google stop? They've mapped streets and trails, even Everest Base Camp. Now, the search engine giant has mapped El Capitan, one of the most famous big wall climbs in the world. As reported in Outside Online:

"Our goal has always been to provide the most comprehensive experience to people around the world," says Deanna Yick, program manager of Google Maps Street View. "Just because the road ends and we can't drive a car there doesn't mean there aren't things we want to see."

One day after his ascent of the Dawn Wall last January, Caldwell strapped a tripod and camera set-up typically used by Google to photograph 360-degree views of businesses to his backpack and went right back up the wall. "Tommy really got us dialed in with all the logistics," say Yick, "He was our main rigger and helped us figure out how to suspend the camera horizontally and get it working 3,000 feet off the ground."

Chad Copeland, a professional photographer whose work has appeared on National Geographic Creative and in worldwide campaigns, took a couple of iPhones and drone and some other gear to Iceland. Check out the amazing images we was able to create in a post on Outside magazine's site.

By Desiree Raven
What does a student do after graduating from Brown University with a bachelor’s degree in literary arts and political science? For Justin Patrick, it was to attend Colorado Mountain College to obtain his associate degree in digital journalism from the Isaacson School for New Media.
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Hi, my name is Cicely Kohler and I'm in the Professional Photography Program at the Isaacson School for New Media. My favorite assignment has been the illustrative photo assignment. I loved the photo I took and it won an Award of Excellence in the College Photographer of the Year Contest. CMC also used the photo to advertise the student photography show!

Isaacson School for New Media alum Patrick Badalian captured the spirit of Aspen Highland's Ski Patrol's end of season celebration. Countless patrollers across Colorado have trained at EMT classes at CMC. Thanks for all you do at all our Colorado resorts: Creating safe terrain and saving lives is hard work. Enjoy the well-deserved summer.
https://vimeo.com/124563621

Radio CMC Student Manager Lucas Turner sits down with Colorado Mountain College President Carrie Hauser to discuss topics like equal access to education and opportunity, dual and concurrent enrollment, tuition, and much more. Enjoy!

This article was printed in the Aspen Sojourner. By Amanda Rae.
[caption id="attachment_46509" align="alignnone" width="627"] Radio CMC station manager, Lucas Turner.Photography by Matt Suby[/caption]
The voice of a community can’t be expressed more clearly than it is on local radio. Now the perspective of a younger generation can be heard in the Roaring Fork Valley, thanks to Radio CMC (radioCMC.com; 102.7 FM from Aspen to Snowmass Canyon, 93.9 FM in Glenwood Springs), a for-profit college station developed as part of the Isaacson School of New Media at Colorado Mountain College. Click for full article.

By Dez Raven
What could be a bigger honor at age 31 than being the first student to get an associate degree from the Isaacson School for New Media at CMC? Alumnus Patrick Badalian is the student who achieved this honor by graduating in December 2014.
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By Dez Raven
What were you doing at age 9? Brian Tinker, associate professor and program coordinator of graphic design at the Isaacson School for New Media, was selling his first illustration for $15. This was big money for a 9-year-old, and helped solidify his desire to create art as a career.
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One of the greatest challenges to photographers seeking to create and immerse themselves in long term, in-depth documentary work is finding sources of funding. PDN recently ran an article collating previously published features on photogs who found creative ways to fund and distribute stories that continued long past typical media attention spans, including Gideon Mendel's decades long work documenting HIV and AIDS, Brenda Ann Kenneally's work with teenage girls in low income neighborhoods in New York and Peter Menzel's work around household consumption and the environment. Read the full story here.

Photographs by noted photojournalist Klaus Kocher are on exhibit at the Glenwood Springs Branch Library beginning Feb. 24. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. on Feb. 26 at the library. Kocher is on the faculty of the Isaacson School for New Media at Colorado Mountain College, and teaches photo history, composition, wet darkroom and photojournalism. Born in Santiago, Chile, to his Swiss father and Dominican mother, he has lived in the United States, Costa Rica, Honduras, Germany and Mexico. His photos reflect his international upbringing.
The library is at 815 Cooper Ave. and is open Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Visit gcpld.org or call the staff at 945-5958 for more information.

It's that time of year again when audio storytellers rejoice: Chicago's Third Coast International Audio Festival (TCIAF). TCIAF, as it notes on its website, "curates sound-rich audio stories from around the world and shares them with as many ears as possible – on the radio, on the Internet, and at public listening events all over the place."

The festival also runs an annual ShortDocs Challenge as part of each festival that invites professionals to newbies to submit their most creative short audio stories based on annual theme.

Smartphones have dealt a body blow to the compact camera market, and Panasonic seems eager to twist the knife with its new Lumix CM1. Like Samsung’s Galaxy Camera, the CM1 fuses an Android smartphone with some serious photography parts. How serious? How about a 1-inch, 20-megapixel CMOS sensor (the same one found in the company’s FZ1000 camera) and a huge upgrade from the tiny sensors crammed into even the highest-end smartphones. It has a 28mm f/2.8 Leica-branded lens with a manual ring to adjust aperture, ISO, focus and shutter speed.

Students in the Isaacson School worked with the new Edgertronic high speed camera to capture lures dropping into water. The initial challenge was in the lighting, ensuring that the water and the lures were lit properly. The second challenge was in setting up the highly technical high FPS camera the school recently acquired. A second team of students used the Black Magic Film camera to capture the scene and the way the students were working together.
"It was interesting to see the whole process of slow motion capture" said Chris Murphy, a second year Graphic Design student in the school. "Learning how to manage the technical parts of production while also designing the video was a real challenge" said Dez Raven, who is nearing her last semester at the school.
https://vimeo.com/120023879

PDN featured photos from Carbondale-based photographer Tyler Stableford's new project as the January 23 "Photo of the Day." Stableford's new project captures ethereal images of an underwater diver swimming with whale sharks off the Yucatan Peninsula. Stableford and his talented crew of Draper White and Kate Rolston have photographed several CMC campaigns and students from the Isaacson School for New Media's Digital Photography program have interns at his Carbondale, Colorado based studio.
Photographer and director Tyler Stableford challenged himself both artistically and technically to create his series, “Into the Deep,” which depicts a model swimming with whale sharks in the waters near Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Every August, whale sharks gather to feed on plankton near the convergence of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean waters. Tyler Stableford decided to shoot just south of that, where the waters were clear and blueAll of the light streams in his images were captured in camera—”no glow ball filter, no sun flare filter…it’s the most meaningful art I’ve ever created.”
Stableford challenged himself both artistically and technically to create the work. Stableford held his breath for extended periods, photographing a trained underwater model swimming with sharks up to 40-feet long. Each image in the series was made in one frame, without the aid of post-production compositing.
“It was a real moonshot to get the moments that we did,” Stableford told PDN via email. “We spent one day doing test shots (and swimming with my wife and kids), and then an arduous shoot day—arduous for our model Ashley, who spent over four hours in a row diving endlessly below the whale sharks, holding her breath, with countless failed attempts on our part, all for various reasons.”

A big part of teaching in the visual arts is working with students to develop the ability to recognize the subtlety of light and shadow, noise patterns in audio, or even the beauty hidden in the abstraction of the programming behind an app or website. Tonight our Digital Publications class took a step back from planning a huge interview based documentary project to consider the basics of lighting, exposure, and sound.

By Desiree Raven
When a new academic program begins, there is always a need to find someone whose enthusiasm, excitement and vision can lead it toward a successful future. Rob Martin, the director of the Isaacson School for New Media at Colorado Mountain College, embodies all of these qualities.
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Robert Martin, the Director of the Isaacson School for New Media at Colorado Mountain College will be presenting at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas Nevada in April. New Media Expo highlights the use of Blogs, Social Media, and Digital Publication platforms. Robs presentation, "New Media, the Visual Revolution" concentrates on the rapidly increasing use of images and video into digital stories. These mixed media stories give viewers a great experience that leverages the deep experiences of media to support the text.
New Media Expo brings Bloggers, Podcasters and Web TV content creators together to learn and network with the most successful New Media content creators in the World. The event is Co-Hosted with N.A.B. Attendees representing every sector of the industry will be there. Broadcast, Digital Media, Film, Entertainment, Telecom, Post-Production, Education, Houses of Worship, Advertising, Military/Government, Retail, Security, Sports, IT and more converge in Las Vegas for six days to feed the need of next-generation content.

From Google books: Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's biographical story of the pioneers of the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and a guide to how innovation really works. The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garret or garage by solo inventors. Instead, most innovations of the digital age were made collaboratively. There were a lot of fascinating people involved, some ingenious and a few even geniuses.
This is the story of these pioneers, hackers, and entrepreneurs-how their minds worked and what made them so creative. The Innovators is filled with fascinating personalities-from early pioneers such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore, to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak and Larry Page. The central digital innovations, Isaacson shows, have come from those who, like Ada, have connected the humanities to technology and the arts to the sciences.
Read reviews on AmazonNew York Times story

Leonardo Dalessandri shot, directed and edited the viral smash 'Watchtower of Turkey' which was seen by over 2.5 million people in three months and nominated as Best Video of 2014 on Vimeo. He discusses how he made this mesmerizing short film. Final Cut Pro X provided all the tools to produce this spectacular and inspirational piece of work.

From Lesson #2: "Design consistency gives you that peace of mind and the sense that this is a stable place to build a relationship. Whenever an app is buggy, the grid doesn't line up, or the type treatment is off, you start to question a company and wonder where else they're slipping. What about my money? Are they going to protect me? You can fix that by caring about the details."

Flickr has uncovered twenty very talented photographers under twenty years old. Their subjects and styles show diverse views of the world. Their mastery of photographic storytelling is beyond their years. Check out their portfolios.

SiriusXM Radio host Pete Dominick interviewed Colorado Mountain College President Carrie Besnette Hauser and Isaacon School for New Media student Justin Patrick during the Aspen Ideas Festival. The interview aired on Dominick's show Stand Up! Isaacson School faculty Corby Anderson was sound engineer for the program and had the table turned when Dominick started interviewing him. Give a listen.

Online multi-media piece goes the distance on American immigration.
Great multi-media journalism giving significant depth to immigration issues, particularly from the perspective of Mexico. Videos of immigrants, including riding "The Beast",Â bring a distance story much closer and personal. Well-done example of parallax design using map based infographics to tell a story.
Interactive Map: Undocumented, Unaccompanied, and Underage
An interactive look at the factors driving the influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America, and the risks faced en route to the U.S.
By Zack Stanton
See Interactive Map/Story
The piece is published on StoryMap.JS, a platform developed by marquee.by.

"Isn't It time we told her she's pretty brilliant, too?"
Powerful Verizon commercial showing the power of social cues in steering girls away from STEM subject, based on National Science Foundation stats that show that "66 percent of 4th grade girls say they like science and math, but only 18 percent of all college engineering majors are female." Read more at the Huffington Post.

Google has ambitious plans to create a map of a healthy human body. According to the Wall Street Journal, "the project will collect anonymous genetic and molecular information from 175 people—and later thousands more—to create what the company hopes will be the fullest picture of what a healthy human being should be." The map will then be used, among other things, to identify causes of diseases and other disorders.
According to WSJ, "Google will use its massive computing power to find patterns, or "biomarkers," buried in the information. The hope is that these biomarkers can be used by medical researchers to detect any disease a lot earlier."
So what's the Google Body equivalent of "street view?" Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

While he was a student in the Isaacson School for New Media Professional Photography program, Adam Hughes was hired to be a production assistant on the set of an independent horror film produced in Snowmass. His video professor told the class about the opportunity and said if they worked on the film they could get extra credit.
â€œIt was a great learning opportunity, and a cool experience to work on a professional set; a chance I will probably never get again unless I am in Hollywood. My name will also be in the credits of the film.â€
Behind the scenes photos here:

As a student, Adam Hughes was hired by PixMob to promote their LED bracelets.
"My professor at Colorado Mountain College was doing video of the concerts in Aspen during the XGames and met the rep from PixMob, who was looking for a videographer.
"Before the show, every person in the crowd was given a bracelet at the gate. During the first half of the Tiësto concert, the bracelets were turned off, but after a while the bracelets were illuminated via wi-fi, controlled by a light board located at the sound booth. Once lit, a sea of colored lights could be seen within the crowd. A light designer was able to change colors and flash the lights to the beat of the songs. Sometimes the stage lights would go completely dark, and all you could see was thousands of floating lights dancing in the crowd.
"I was hired by this company to take video of the concert, but mostly the crowd wearing the bracelets, to promote their product. The crowd was very energetic and I got a lot of really great footage."

They're covering the biggest protest movement Brazil has seen in two decades. Felipe Marques, one of the volunteer Midia Ninja's leaders, stands by a chart of Brazil's new soccer stadiums and explains the schedule for World Cup games from Rio to Manaus.
"We'll get word out to everyone via Twitter about alternative events, protests happening in front of the stadiums themselves," he says. "Ever since the eruption of protests in 2013, we're trying to build a new reality that addresses the underlying problems."
The list of problems includes poor healthcare and education. So why then, protestors ask, did we spend about $15 billion on soccer stadiums? The protests all began last summer ... over a 10-cent hike in bus fares in Sao Paulo. Hundreds of thousands of mainly poor people piled into the streets. Police responded with beatings, pepper spray and bullets.
Midia Ninjas captured a lot of the protest, live streaming images of police chasing down a female protestor and beating and kicking her. Such footage infuriated Brazil's middle class, who joined the protestors in cities across the country.
Read the full story here on PRI's The World.
Listen to the story here.
Watch the story here.

Walter Isaacson, the author of a bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, is posting chapters of his next book online for crowdsourced edits. The as-yet-untitled book, which he describes as "a narrative about the people who helped to create the most important innovations of the digital age," argues that innovation is often the result of collaboration, rather than a single inventor. In keeping with that idea, he has posted sections on websites including LiveJournal, Scribd, and asked for "notes, comments, [and] corrections."
Excerpt from NPR.org. Read more.

What's worse than a embarrassing political story spreading like an online brushfire? Seeing a screamer headline in Colorado's largest newspaper, The Denver Post, throw more gasoline on the blaze. Ouch! I thought they liked him. Read more here.
Governor Hickenlooper backpedaled on gun control in a meeting with Colorado sheriffs on Friday, June 13. Montezuma County Sheriff Dennis Spruell posted about Hickenlooper's apology on his department's Facebook page as the governor was speaking. It blew up.
PR doesn't get any better — or worse, depending upon your perspective. It's cheap, too. And when the story goes front page, jackpot!

This video was produced by 5-time Emmy award winning engineer Andy Mills, of High End TV in Nashville, Tennessee. Adam was the â€œEICâ€ (Engineer in Charge) for the tour and worked side by side with Corby in â€œthe truck.â€
CMC New Media Adjunct Instructor Corby Anderson teaches video, audio and radio production, as well as multimedia for the Issacson School.Â When he's not helping students dream up and produce interesting stories, he works here in the Roaring Fork Valley and on the road as a freelance production professional in all three of those realms, including the X Games, World Cup Skiing, Sirius Satellite Radio, CrossFit Games, and many other productions.
This summer, Corby worked as the Technical Director of the CrossFit Games Regional events in Jacksonville, Fla., Cincinatti, Ohio, Fairfax, VA, and Boston, Mass.
A Technical Director, or TD, is responsible for everything that shows up on screen on a production - including all cameras, video playback, and graphics. He is ultimately responsible for everything technical that goes into a production, serving as a point person for the director and producer to look to in keeping the production on track.
It is intense, difficult work. The CrossFit Games events last all day long, with heats kicking off one after the other, up to 24 a day. Corby's job was to make sure that all heats were properly broadcast. In the early heats, Corby directed and TD'd the full shows, which involved â€œcallingâ€ (â€œReady camera one, slow zoom out to the rigâ€¦â€) the show and â€œpunchingâ€ it (pressing the correct combination of buttons on the video switcher) at the same time. In the main events, the TD responds to the directors wishes. Whatever he wants on screen, the TD delivers. He also keeps an eye out for good shots developing (or falling apart,) graphics that are ready (or NOT ready, ) and keeps an eye on every other aspect of the broadcast.

Burn is an evolving online journal for emerging photographers curated by Magnum photog David Alan Harvey. They have an annual Emerging Photographer Fund Grant in the amount of $10K.
Currently they are running a year long - group sourced Instagram feed portfolio experiment with Instagram: http://www.burnmagazine.org/dialogue/2013/07/burndiary/.Â Each week, a different photographer will take over the BURN instagram, sharing and posting photos taken in real time, 1-2 photos a day. At the end of the year, there will be 52 different portfolios, each sourced by a different photo. The f account will be taken over the first week, starting June 31, by last year's emerging photog fund winner Matt Lutton. Harvey sees Instagram as a tool not only for play but for serious photography- A great meld of traditional old style photographer using not only a new platform, but engaging it in social ways

I would like to thank all artists who submitted their amazing work to be apart of the first issue of Frame. I would also like to thank the team of talented students who helped create this amazing publication, especially Cody Andrew our Art Director. Last, I would like to thank you, the reader, who have opened up this magazine to look at the artwork created by Colorado Mountain College students.
It has been a long four months to not only produce Frame but to simultaneously get the Zine Club off the ground and running. We have hosted several successful events our first semester including an open mic night which is now a monthly event on the Spring Valley campus. We also have plans to grow and expand next semester including community service projects and adding other publications to our collection. I couldn't be more excited about the response that the student body and faculty have had to the creation of the Zine Club and for Frame.
It has been my pleasure to serve as the first Editor-In-Chief of the Club and of Frame. I have enjoyed watching these projects grow from ideas to an actual document and student organized club. I am very excited to see this grow into a cornerstone of the college and to become the voice for a community of artists. Thank you again for taking time to view the first issue of Frame and we look forward to your continued interest in our future work.
Curtis Tucker

A handful of CMC students headed to the XGames over the weekend and captured the event via Instagram and Twitter. We're starting off eNews this Monday by sharing a few moments from their weekend below. Happy viewing!

If you're interested in learning more about Instagram, Twitter, and other social media for business or personal interest, check out the calender ofÂ CMC Isaacson School for New Media Black Diamond WorkshopsÂ offered this spring. Numerous one-day and short-term workshops are still open.